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Item The Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.Item Ukhu Mankakuna: Culinary Representations in Quechua Cultural Texts(2006-04-28) Krogel, Alison Marie; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores culinary representations within colonial and contemporary Quechua texts selected from the genres of oral narrative, photography, painting, historical chronicle, song, poetry and the novel. The first chapter presents a cultural history of Andean foodstuffs, as well as an ethnographic narrative based on interviews with vendors and cooks in the Cuzco Central Market. The ensuing analysis reveals some of the conflicts and negotiations associated with the market's hierarchy of profits and prestige. Chapter two focuses on pre-colonial and colonial culinary representations as portrayed in various Incaic Quechua hymns, the Comentarios reales and religious canvases, while the third chapter explores contemporary representations of Quechua female cooks in Los ríos profundos, Asunta Quispe Huamán's Autobiografia and the photographs of Martín Chambi. Chapter four discusses the representation of the malevolent layqa wayk'uq ('witch cook') in a number of Quechua willakuy (oral narrations) which I recorded, transcribed and translated in highland villages of Southern Perú. In analyzing the nuances and levels of meaning contained within examples of Quechua expressive art, I offer semantic and syntactic readings of the texts while also considering the socio-economic, historical and political contexts in which they were created. I also explore the ways in which Quechua artists manipulate the representation of Andean foodstuffs and cooks as an oppositional tactic for evading and manipulating the repressive tendencies of powerful political, economic and social discourses. I argue that in these texts, the 'everyday practice' of cooking allows Quechua women to take an active role in shaping their society and the lives of their families and community. In addition to exploring some of the unique aspects of Quechua aesthetic expression in both colonial and contemporary texts, this dissertation concludes with a discussion of food politics and policies in contemporary Perú. Scholars studying food's role in society have long provided important insights in disciplines such as history, philosophy, anthropology, literature and sociology. By strategically crossing over these disciplinary boundaries in choosing theoretical and methodological tools, this dissertation creates a dialogue with the fields of Andean Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, Comparative Literature, Anthropology and Food Studies.Item Textual Trespassing: Tracking the Native Informant in Literatures of the Americas(2004-11-02) Shemak, April A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes notions of two disparate fields of study--postcolonial and U.S. ethnic studies--through an analysis of contemporary narratives located in the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. My choice of texts is dictated by their multiple locations, allowing me to consider postcolonial and ethnic studies as simultaneous formations. Throughout the dissertation I use the trope of trespassing in its various connotations to explore how these narratives represent native spaces, migration and U.S. spatial formations. Furthermore, I explore the manner in which testimonio surfaces as a narrative device in several of the texts. I establish the parameters of my project by describing the disciplines and theoretical discourses with which I engage. I argue that it is necessary to expand the boundaries of U.S. ethnic literature to include the literatures of the Americas. Furthermore, I also consider the implications of the trope of trespassing vis-à-vis my own subject position my own subject position and the narratives I analyze. Chapter two investigates the manner in which, despite contemporary theoretical and cultural critiques of essentialism, one continues to sense a reverence for sacrosanct notions of authenticity, origins, and nativism in contemporary narratives. I explore these themes as they occur in texts from Jamaica, Guyana and Martinique and consider how these novels complicate the alignment of indigeneity with essentialism through their use of postmodern narrative tactics. In chapter three, I shift my investigation to Haitian and Cuban narratives of migration and the manner in which testimony, when it is linked to migration, becomes a means of trespassing especially for refugees who must constructing the postcolonial native space as “corrupt” as they attempt to gain political asylum in the United States. I argue that such texts as Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban reflect discourses of disease as a way of representing the “unhealthy” relationships between the U.S. and Haiti and Cuba. Chapter four charts the movement of the native informant from the postcolonial native locale to the ethnic immigrant space. I use Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the postcolonial critic as “New Immigrant-native informant” as an analytical frame for addressing the ways in which Dominican American writers adopt or reject the role of native informant in the novels (for example, Julia Alvarez, Loida Maritza Perez and Nelly Rosario). Chapter five reflects a convergence of postcolonial and ethnic American concerns as it explores the implications of trespassing and testimony in narratives that represent transnational labor practices. I juxtapose the 1991 U.S. Congressional Hearings which address the plight of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic through an appropriation of testimonial discourse with the subjective representations of migrant workers in the novels of Edwidge Danticat and Francisco Goldman.